RambleOn

To anyone that defends Gizmodo

These are your heroes, from the affidavit (pdf, via wired), Brian Lam, editor for Gizmodo in a letter to the Apple CEO:

P.S. I hope you take it easy on the kid who lost it. I don’t think he loves anything more than Apple except, well, beer. Maybe some spankings.

I don’t like Apple’s secrecy, I don’t like them influencing law enforcement divisions that have cops busting down the doors of people’s homes and taking all their computing equipment over a stupid phone.

But these people aren’t journalists. They are little boys who find themselves with a platform for wrecking other people’s lives.

Field of Dreams

“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.”

I used to love baseball. And maybe for one or two glorious years in little league, I was good at baseball. But Babe Ruth league came, and the pitchers got better, and I didn’t. I’d have 2, maybe 3 games at the start that I’d go 2 for 3, or 3 for 4, but then I’d start a game full of piss and vinegar, and come up to bat expecting to hit my customary line drive up the middle or between first and second and I’d strike out.

And the season would go downhill from there, I’d never get the groove back.

Baseball is a strange game. It’s a game where the simplest measure of success for hitters is itself an abysmal failure, its superstars git a hit somewhere around 3 times out of 10. 30% success at the plate (I know it’s not quite that simple, but humor me) but perfection in the field, dead aim in the arm, and sprinter’s speed 90 feet at a time.

In a sense, it was good preparation and a good metaphor for a career in computing.

I’m one of those odd hybrids, a developer that’s a systems administrator, or maybe a systems administrator that’s a developer, I don’t know. I’m pretty good at what I do, which of course means I guess I’m not at the top of the game for either. While many of my colleagues in the field seem to get to focus on one thing or another, I’m the journeyman utility player, trying to keep track of a thousand things at once, and experiencing a continual string of successive failures, while maintaining perfection (or illusion thereof) of error-free service in the field.

Just this week – here’s just a snapshot, what I happen to remember while writing this:

• trying to work around what appears to be a bug in a release version of OpenSSL after a few hundred SVN operations by using SSH
• finding out after 5 hours of trying to boot rescue disks through a DRAC that I need a rootdelay of at least 20 in my grub config on my dell server.
• re-learning NTP configuration for what feels like the 10th time, trying to figure out why I can’t force a lower stratum on the box I need to act as a time server, only to find out we were given the wrong upstream time server
• realizing that in many cases we are routing traffic through a CISCO ASA when we don’t need to, dropping my throughput by a third routing through my CISCO ASA
• shelling in at 10pm to mark a notification email as send_error = true, because out of 85,000 emails before it, it’s the first I’ve seen trigger an unknown bug adding an ActionMailer exception message to a serialized data field, which is throwing cron errors every 5 minutes, just happy that I coded a bailout condition in the first place
• worrying if tomorrow brings more failed emails, that I’ve got to find some contact at the University of Kentucky central campus mail people because they are suddenly blocking our daily notification emails, but only for some of their clients, and none of the others that saw those bounces understand that’s what happened, or if they did, they are hoping that somebody else is going to take care of it
• to having to put together a presentation on the basics “tagging” because using a string of characters in as a ad-hoc description is a lot scarier to using a string of characters that somebody else defined to describe something, or maybe it’s just because it’s called “tagging”
• worrying about the fallout from a tagging change that had to be changed to be consistent with all our other tools, because for three years we were developing in individual vacuums, only the fallout is coming up a month after it was released, because it’s the first time anyone has used the application that used it differently before that triggers the problems
• worrying about colleagues wondering if we shouldn’t re-introduce the inconsistent behavior, even though it was part of a 3 month long development cycle to change to be consistent
• a contract job where performance problems are plaguing the application so badly that we are now shelling out to php/gd from rails because imagemagick and rmagick are too slow in a VPS environment – or maybe any environment, and once that was licked we are now struggling with 1 second response times on mobile views when we need 500ms response times (and even that is honestly too slow)

And that’s probably a fourth of it this week. All the while, I am getting crap because I am not open and receptive to everybody’s “great ideas” that I already worked through and spec’d last year, and wanted very much to do, but there’s no time to do it, because all of my team is working through new comps, or is out sick or is responding to support email for stuff we did 6 months ago.

I asked for this. I put myself in this postion. Absorbing everything I could about as many areas in my field as possible, finding myself feeling the person that has to step up to everything from systems to code to support to whatever it takes to make it work, jack of all trades, and master of none.

Some days though, you just want the constant failures to stop . To have the opportunity, for just once, to dig in, spend the time, and become a master at just… one… thing. To implement just one of the 100 ideas you’ve had before next year, when 6 months from now, somebody uses your app for the first time and complains about it not having that idea you know it needs. To make the time to do one thing (or a few things) really, really well, and the way you know it should be done.

Some days, I’d just like that walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth, and not go 0 for 4 in the second game of the doubleheader.

But, I guess it’s as Yogi Berra said, “If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be.”

This pretty much sums it up

I’m a pretty open dude. My job responsibilities also lead me to leaving a tremendous number of “electronic footprints” out there – mainly so I can help and understand and empower others to navigate that online aspect of their lives.

Twitter giving my tweets to the Library of Congress? That’s okay, I wish they’d ask, but if my inanity will befuddle a future anthropologist – well that’s a little cool.

But some settings are a bit creepy. And Facebook is the creepiest of all. Not that you’ve ever been able to trust Facebook with your privacy – but it’s now gotten a whole lot worse – they will be using your friends to share everything with advertisers that you have chosen to keep private.

These were the defaults presented to me seeing this for the first time. After I’ve gone and pretty much restricted everything to just friends.

Even worse, if your friends use “instant personalization” ? You’ll have to explicitly block the applications they allow – at least according to Facebook themselves:

If you’ve never signed up with Facebook, don’t do it now.

C’mon Put Up Your Dukes

Lazy Sunday

Lord of the Realm

Software feature shout-out

As a software developer, I’m keenly aware that the tools we create both empower and frustrate those that use them. I guess after what feels to be four or five internet lifetimes by now, I’ve gotten used to adapting to the features – and the quirks – of whatever software packages I use myself.

My development, both at work, personal, and contract deals with MySQL. And for a long time, I’d run a local instance of phpMyAdmin so that I could get at the DB. And I’m grateful for phpMyAdmin – but most of the time I just need something that will help create db’s and users, and give me a nice interface and history for queries.

And that’s when I started using Querious for the Macintosh. If it all it did was give me a native application to do the routine stuff, and a query window, I’d be fine with it, and it would be worth the $30.

One feature in particular though that stands out, and that has come in amazingly handy is their CSV import. To assist some friends and colleagues of mine in a simulated baseball draft league, I wrote a web app that manages the baseball draft – and allows custom rankings of players for individual league owners. Importing that data though involves trying to get an excel spreadsheet of stats into the database – and for anyone that’s done this, you know it can be a major pain to line up stat columns and types with the db columns.

Not so with Querious. The app has what might be one of my favorite features in a software program ever – a drag and drop association of import columns to db columns:

I don’t have to do this a lot, but man when I did, this came in extremely handy.

The application also has the built in ability to create ssh tunnels for connecting to remote systems, which is also an extremely handy feature.

It’s a great feature, and a great app, and one of the most useful tools I own. A big thanks to Araelium for developing it.

Pure Happiness

Family

In lieu of pup face of the week:

Health Care

Whatever your believe on the health care debate – you owe it to ourself to watch this:

The text is here. I don’t know if it is as compelling as the video.

I watch it and my blood boils at the damage and destruction to reasonable discourse resulting from the “death panel” comments that Sarah Palin and others made. This is fundamentally why I’ll never vote republican again at the national level as long as people like her, and other obstructionists purely in it for their own gain are anywhere near the GOP. I don’t know that the democrats are all that much better in many areas, but right here in this one, the activities of the republicans are completely shameful.

Pass the damn bill. No it’s not perfect, nothing ever is, but we have to start making steps for health and insurance reform. Pass the damn bill.